


the sun comes up, I think about you

by fmo



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-25
Updated: 2014-04-25
Packaged: 2018-01-20 19:20:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1522592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fmo/pseuds/fmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shameless reincarnation indulgence.</p><p>Bucky Barnes died in 1945. In 2014, the curator of the Captain America archives at NYU tries to write an academic article about the 1943 World Exposition of Tomorrow, and finds she can imagine it vividly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sun comes up, I think about you

“I’ve always been interested in the SSR and the Howling Commandos operations,” she says. She crosses her legs under the table, feeling out of place in the professional knee-length skirt her mother bought her for interviews after she graduated college.

Sometimes she’s not sure how true that is.

Even before she was in kindergarten, she was always interested in the old Captain America movies on Turner Classic Movies. All her family always says how amazing it was how even when she was too little to understand, she’d sit quietly in front of a Captain America or Howling Commandos documentary on PBS, just looking at the still images and bits of old film reels. The old joke is that her dad was always a World War II buff, and he passed that on to her.

But the thing is, she’s not sure exactly what came first. Did she watch the movies because she was interested in Captain America, or did she say she was interested in Captain America because something drew her to the pictures on the screen?

Across the bare, new-looking wooden table, the interviewer tilts his head slightly. She knows what he’s thinking: ever since St—ever since Captain Rogers was found and saved New York from aliens last summer, there’s been a whole new wave of Captain America fans.

She wants the interviewer to know that she’s the real deal. “I wrote my honors thesis on the role of the SSR and the Commandos in the genesis of the Truman Doctrine,” she says.

In fact, she could undoubtedly do more with her degree than lead tours and lectures through the Captain America archives at NYU (although the position isn’t without its prestige), but this is what she wants to do, more than anything.

All her life, she’s read every last scrap of information, looked over every single picture there is of the Howling Commandos, and it hasn’t been quite enough. She’s always been grasping for just a little something more, something beyond the surface that she can’t see.

She has nightmares sometimes. Of a man with a German accent taking her out of a prison cell somewhere dark and chemical-smelling, of running along a swaying beam over an emptiness filled with fire, of falling—no, not of falling, but of hanging on with all her strength and knowing it’s not enough, that she’s going to fall.

She gets the job. She moves into a nice shared apartment in Park Slope. Life is sweet, mostly.

Contrary to what some people seem to imagine, she doesn’t follow the blogs and gossip sites that track Captain America’s every movement. He’s a real person, and it’s creepy. As for his handsomeness, he’s not really her type; broad shoulders and muscles aren’t what she tends to look for. And as for his heart, well, as a historian she doesn’t make the mistake of thinking she knows him just because she’s seen the documentation of his life.

Instead, she focuses on her work, her lecture on the Commandos as a groundbreaking integrated unit, and the article she’s writing, with her old college advisor’s encouragement, about the 1943 World Exposition of Tomorrow.

Really, it’s supposed to be a way of examining 1943’s visions of the future as they connect to the modern world, but her old interests creep in at the edges of her writing. She reads the contemporary reports of Howard Stark’s appearances in the Stark Pavilion and thinks of a young Howard Stark—not the silver-haired dignitary they always show pictures of when he’s mentioned on the news, but the young one with slick-backed hair and a dark mustache who helped found SHIELD.

She writes, and out of the archived newspaper write-ups and Stark press releases from 1943 she finds the image of a warm June night, dark with splashes of neon color and spotlights, the smell of popcorn (not the fake butter smell from a movie theater, but a better, cleaner smell) and Howard Stark on stage with a mirror-shining red car.

It doesn’t escape her that Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes might have gone to the Expo together. It happened near enough to their neighborhood, and the timing is right for Bucky to have gone before he shipped out and Steve before he enlisted. The records are deliberately obscure (and in some places censored) as to exactly when and where Steve did successfully enlist, but she indulges herself by imagining that he might have done it at the enlistment booth there right at the Expo.

When the article is done, somehow it’s less a cold analysis of the Expo’s predictions of the future and more a whirlwind of sense impressions—a tour of the Expo as she sees it in her mind, based on the dry documents and sparse photos she has. She even allows herself to leave in the sentence supposing that Barnes and Rogers might have gone, or that Rogers could have enlisted there; it’s not inaccurate, and it’s a bit of added interest for the readers. And the editor can always take it out if they don’t like it.

She proofreads the article one last time and sends it.

**Author's Note:**

> Like how awkward is this? (So awkward.) Even more awkward if Steve eventually tried to date her and then she kept somehow writing "academic articles" that turned into extraordinarily accurate recallings of real things that happened that nobody else knows about. (Like maybe Steve making out with Bucky, oho.)
> 
> Title from "Losing My Mind" from "Follies."


End file.
